My $700 Medium Story Has 60 Grammarly Errors

Why I’m trusting my instincts and not changing a thing

One of the most common tips I’ve seen on Medium for new writers is to use an Artificial Intelligence helper like Grammarly to clean and polish their posts. I was already a Grammarly Premium subscriber when I joined, so a big check in that box for me.

Grammarly helped me to pick up spelling errors, double spaces between words, and overuse of the passive voice.

After that, our relationship ran into problems. We disagreed on the complexity of my sentences, and the way I tend to hyperbolise and use words that don’t exist. I’m not complaining, mind, but Grammarly just hadn’t taken the time to get to know the real me. Frankly, I don’t think it ever will.

I choose to ignore many of the suggestions from apps like Grammarly, and there are good reasons why you might decide to do the same.

This is my most popular Medium post as of September 2020:

It was one of the first stories I wrote as a new Medium subscriber, and I poured my tech-happy heart into it. This story alone earned me over $700 AUD in its first month.

A story with sixty errors, no less! By errors, I mean the number of things the AI flagged for me to fix after I’d taken care of the spelling mistakes.

For the record, ProWritingAid flagged this story, the one you’re reading right now, with twenty-six potential errors.

I want to say that I really do love Grammarly—warm fuzzies come over me whenever I see their emails in my inbox. I admit to saving them in my email archive instead of trashing them. It’s incredibly encouraging to be told how superbly well I’m doing each week, and I may just go back and read them again when I need a boost. Sad? Oh well! That’s the power of positive talk.

My Premium subscription with Grammarly expired recently. I didn’t renew it because I found a cheaper alternative that I hope will prove just as good. ProWritingAid is wonderful, but I still miss those motivating Grammarly emails.

Learning What to Fix and What to Leave Alone

After I fixed the typos in my Mac apps story, it was time to decide which AI suggestions to take on board, and which to ignore.

At first I thought I’d need a moderately large paragraph to talk about this, but instinct isn’t something I can adequately put into words. I read what I’d written to see if it felt and sounded like me, like the way I think and talk. When it did, I was done. Simple as that.

Another tip I heard a lot from experienced writers: read your work out loud. I admit I’ve been reading “out loud” in my head at the pace of speech rather than thought, instead of speaking audibly. It’s working so far.

The Problem With AI

The problem with all AI writing assistants is this: if I follow their every suggestion, a lot of what makes my voice unique will be distorted, suffocated, or erased.

I’m learning to trust my instincts and retain sentence structures that Grammarly, ProWritingAid and Hemingway want to reshape and whittle down until I don’t sound like me at all. Yes, I really do want to use the words “just” and “actually” from time to time.

The Confidence to Embrace My Own Voice

I’m thankful that I’ve learned to be brave enough to go with what I think my writing should feel like, over what an external source tells me is best. It’s taken me years to build up the confidence to speak with my own voice. To know that what I say and how I say it isn’t perfect, but it is perfectly true to who I am at this moment.